Old And New

The reopening of the Islamic wing at the Met.

A sixteenth-century plate from Turkey and a seventeenth-century dagger from India.Credit Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fourteen lamps hanging, aglow, beckon you to an entrance to the Metropolitan Museum’s Islamic wing, which is open again after eight years of expansion and renovation. The lamps were made recently, in Brooklyn, of clear glass, tactfully absent the garnishes of pattern and color of the venerable mosque lamps in display cases below them. Sheila Canby, the chief curator of the museum’s Islamic department, told me that the new lamps are deliberate bait: a bit of theatre to advertise the display of some twelve hundred objects. Fifteen galleries represent historical Muslim realms from Spain to South Asia, between the seventh and the twentieth century. (Trying to do it all in a day will wreck you; come back repeatedly.) Likewise, the museum commissioned, from Egypt, the wooden grilles for the windows that look out onto the atrium of the Roman Court; and Moroccan craftsmen built a lovely tiled and cedar-beamed Maghrebi-Andalusian-style courtyard, with a bubbling fountain. Canby and her team understand that many in the museum’s public lack familiarity with Islamic arts. I recall being practically alone on visits to the dim and disheartening cul-de-sac of the old wing. The new one, grandly processional in scheme and finely intimate in detail, does its job of attraction and initiation with judicious flair. But the job is tough.

Clash or no clash, Islamic and Western civilizations hardly harmonize. Consider that almost none of the religious, courtly, and domestic objects in the wing were created for exhibition. They had uses. Many—very many—are beautiful. Beauty rolls in waves and seethes in eddies throughout the installations of dazzling ceramics, noble architectural fragments and statuary, fabulous carpets, enchanting miniatures from manuscripts and albums, and the extraordinarily varied and elegant calligraphy of handmade Korans, along with choice fabrics, metalwork, jewelry, and weapons. But it’s beauty with a purpose, and it demands historical awareness. Succinct wall texts helpfully describe apposite regions, sects, dynasties, styles, patrons, and events. As the names take on meaning, the exhibits come alive. I count myself a fit representative of the sketchily informed Occidental viewer, almost confident at some points while gasping like a beached fish at others. The coincidental timing of the new wing’s début invites each of us to a personal Arab Spring.

Born in Mecca early in the seventh century, Islam spread swiftly under the caliphs of Medina and then, starting in 661, under the Damascus-centered Umayyads, whose empire surged as far as the Atlantic and the Indus Valley. In 750, the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads. They made Baghdad (and later also Samarra) their capital and instituted the Golden Age of Islam, rich in literature, science, mathematics, and scholarship. The Abbasids gradually lost power amid numerous conflicts: with the Umayyads, who retained Western lands; the schismatic Shia Muslims; the Christians, who waged the Crusades; and the Mongols, who destroyed Baghdad in 1258. Islam was subjected to a new round of conquests in the late fourteenth century, when Timur, or Tamerlane—a Muslim, but ecumenically murderous even of co-religionists—subdued most of western and central Asia. His descendants ruled Iran, among other regions. Their regimes fostered glorious arts, comparable to those of the Mughal Empire in the Indian subcontinent. West of them, the Ottomans conquered Byzantine Constantinople in 1453; surged into Europe until they were stopped, twice, at the gates of Vienna, in 1529 and 1683; and dominated the Middle East until the nineteenth century, when temporal Islam underwent spates of humiliation by European powers.

Through it all, one thing remains constant: the Koran. The book of Muhammad’s revelations, told to him via the Archangel Gabriel, is central to all Islamic cultures. First propagated orally by the Prophet’s followers and inscribed on whatever materials were at hand, the text continued to be handwritten by calligraphers long after Gutenberg mechanically printed the Bible, in the fourteen-fifties. The gestures of their handwriting resonate with a visual language that, rooted in pre-Islamic times, was perfected by Muslim artists and designers: the arabesque. To grasp Islamic aesthetics, Westerners must upend their sense of ornamentation as a minor art. Certain ambient pleasures merge with sanctity in Muslim styles. The Met wing makes this point in its first room, with a miscellany of treasures that prominently includes a page of a large Koran from Uzbekistan, made in the late fourteenth or the early fifteenth century. The spiky and sinuous rhythms of the lettering as much as herald everything that follows, even in secular luxury goods and figurative works. Frequent hints of water, as in blue and turquoise glazes on intricate tilework, suggest a Paradise particular to a religion that emerged from desert lands. The logic of Islamic art isn’t iconographic. It is poetic and all but musical.

Pictures of people and animals in religious contexts run afoul of iconoclastic Muslim doctrine, of course, but outside these arenas they abounded, especially in Iran and at Mughal courts. (In the wing’s last room, we find Mughal artists serving as illustrators of gods for Hindu patrons; there is even a fruit bat, done with Audubon-like precision, for a naturalist-minded English chief justice of Bengal.) No doubt nervously, the Met asserts its foundational commitment to art history by including two small images of Muhammad; one of them, “The Night Journey of Muhammad,” a charming sixteenth-century folio illustration from Herat, in modern-day Afghanistan, shows the Prophet riding the Buraq, a human-headed horse, through the Seven Heavens, amid angels, as men doze in a mosque courtyard below. (It and other works on paper will be rotated, to preserve them from the deteriorating effects of prolonged light.) Like the old wing, the new one provides stools for close-up contemplation of the delicate phantasmagoria of illuminated manuscripts and discrete little paintings, bathed with washes of light in slanted vitrines. Details in illustrations of a Sufi poem, “Language of the Birds,” were painted with hairs from the bellies of squirrels. Sit, look.

Photographs must substitute for the premier Islamic art—architecture—except in the museum’s fabulous Ottoman “Damascus Room” (1707) and a chamber of a ruined tenth-century house from Nishapur, Iran. The Met’s participation in excavations at Nishapur, before and after the Second World War, accounts for some of the Iranian works that form about half the museum’s collection of twelve thousand Islamic objects. (The installation will change, from time to time, to showcase items now in storage.) But for the majestic halls that are hung with Iranian and Ottoman carpets, a gallery of mostly Iranian ceramics, often created for middle-class markets from the ninth to the thirteenth century, harbors more concentrated beauty than any other in the wing. I can close my eyes now and summon the aqueous aura of a blue-glazed bowl in which silhouetted fish swim, surrounded by radiating lines that are sublimely both perfect, as design, and imperfect, in the slight vagaries of the painter’s hand. As a one-off visual definition of the word “sophisticated,” that bowl will do. Exiting the room, I felt a trifle different from the person I had been when I entered.

The Islamic wing affords adventures in difference. It made me acutely conscious of myself as European-American—a latter-day scion of the Renaissance wedding of Greek and Roman with Judeo-Christian traditions. It did this by reversing my sense of Islam as a topic of study: rather abruptly, Islam seemed to be scrutinizing me. The Met’s faux mosque lamps put me in mind of the last time I felt this way, on my only trip to a Muslim land. In Istanbul’s Süleymaniye Mosque, built by the genius architect Sinan for Suleiman the Magnificent, in the sixteenth century, I was struck by how a tier of scores of lamps dropped from the immense and shadowy spaces above, as if curious about the goings on along the carpeted floor. The effect, like Heaven pressing down to earth, is exactly the opposite of the symbolic updraft of Christian religious architecture. Christian prayers skyrocket. Muslim prayers skim the ground, toward Mecca. Like the sides of a coin, both conceptions can be seen, but they cannot see each other. ♦

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